google ad words - any experience?

Hi all, any advice much appreciated
Slight deviation from the normal graphic design requests, I'm doing a simple website in iWeb for a non-web savvy client, whose priority is getting traffic to his site.
A colleague has suggested that google ad words is the best way to go, so I wondered if anyone had used it on behalf of a client and/or could give me a basic explanation of how it works and, more importantly, IF it works?
many thanks
simon

To quote from a Guardian article
"AdWords are text ads that are clearly labelled as "sponsored links" so consumers do not confuse the ads with the natural listings Google generates.

AdWords works on an auction-based system that assigns particular words to whichever company bids the most for them . Google makes its billions by taking the money advertisers have bid every time a user clicks on an ad.

In order to prevent bidders securing words that are completely unrelated to their businesses, Google monitors how popular each ad is. If an ad receives few clicks, meaning that consumers do not find the ad particularly relevant to the search they have performed, Google determines it is not relevant and downgrades it in its sponsored link ranking system.

This also ensures that in the long run the most relevant, and therefore most lucrative, ads appear the most frequently."

In practice you pay an amount for the search terms you choose, which can range from a few pence to pounds. But you can set a budget of X amount per day and you pay for each click through to your website.

It does need looking after. . . we ran with adwords for a while but the guy who was looking after it wasn't particularly experienced and in reality it cost more than it gained us.

Good SEO (optimising the website) will do well; as will good coding; keeping the website updated with info; links into the site (from good websites); and links within the site - ideally a combination of these will help the site rise naturally in Google/Yahoo - which is free(!)

The 'spiders' look for words so make sure that any pictures have 'alt' tags and that there are enough words on the site (200 - 250 per page).

It helps if his domain name has some relevance to what he is selling also eg bloggoseller.co.uk rather than blsltd.co.uk

Hi many thanks Katedesign, very helpful. I don't think he'd welcome the idea of trying to maintain it himself, so I suppose I could monitor it for him - for a nominal fee of course
The client's a landscape gardener and his web domain is (name)landscapes.co.uk so that should also help
very useful info, so thanks again
Simon